missed connections

• wherearetheOtherPeople

today • wherearetheOtherPeople

Hey, I’m posting here to ask how I can focus on my classes among all these hot people? I thought I could finally focus on my studies now that it’s exam season, but jokes on me I guess! The only thing I’m studying right now is the pretty smile of the guy in front of me in line at Burger King. If you’re reading this, you in the Twilight hoodie and orange crocs please tell me you waved at me and not someone behind me.
Tho it was probably to someone else huh :(

Hello. I’m posting on here today to –is “today” too much of a relative term? Am I being too formal?

Let’s try that again.

Hiii! Today, I happened to meet

Here it goes again with “today.” That doesn’t feel right. I mean, “today” for me can mean yesterday for you. But is there even another word that can replace it? “Just now” seems too urgent, and the longer the moments pass the more dated it becomes, even more so than “tomorrow.” “At this time of writing” seems too unfriendly , no?

Maybe the semantics of it are just complicated. Maybe my refusal to be satisfied with the word “today” comes from a stubborn emotion deep within my voracious psyche. Because on this page, it will always be “today.” Where its events will be immortalized in a perpetual state of present time. No deadline, no lament over the arrival of a “tomorrow.” But that’s not realistic, is it? “Tomorrow’s” only purpose is to spite carpe diem.

Tomorrow is a reminder that memories degrade like weathering rocks over time just like bonds and stocks you hold over in someone’s heart —sometimes the value only degrades, and degrades until there is but new dirt ready to become the soil of another plant in the forest of time. Where the unheard whispers and names caught on tongue only exist as speculative fiction, instead of a sprawled web of desperate words clutching onto a retreating warmth. Where it is entirely laughable to try and figure out the identity of a spirit that slipped through like the sharp breath of a just cracked-open soda through strangers on the internet.

I try to find the right words as if I hadn’t missed the timing to say them already.

Let’s say today is a question. And I ask, I ask, will you always find me beautiful? If so, do you mean beauty like a firework? Like a momentary crescendo that only ends up as cold sparks and ash. Like a challenge, I ask about forever knowing that today will always disappear. I ask for something simple. Simple like a grain of sand, a fiber from a feather, a papercut to find later, the direction of your stare. Something like the warmth of your fingertips, the ends of your smile, the last note of your favorite song. Today is desperate to continue as a question. You ask for too much. It wants to give you something so small you’d miss it. It wants you to want something so little you’ll start counting down the seconds until your lecture ends, the morning hug of your bed will start feeling tighter, your stomach will becomes a sour craving of the day that you are already in. You will want that little thing so much that once given, you’ll forget to want again. Or—

Let’s say today is something that only tries to be—and never becomes. Like maybe no matter how many people I count in a crowd it will never reach anything close to the population of the Earth and the difference between me getting close to them will amount to nothing. Like maybe it will , or it does , or it has, and then the friends, the lovers, the mentors, the people become a simple member of a crowd again, maybe a silhouette, or the vague shape of the number eight billion. Like when a child tries to grow up to be a singer before they try to smile and speak before a crowd other than their parents, they won't become one later. Maybe they study data instead. Until someone tells them they love their voice —the way they carry their vowels like remainders in simple addition, how their timbre feels as smooth as their morning coffee with a rasp in low tones that matches its bitterness. Or—

Let's say today is that breath on the cusp of spilling out, like words that tremble in anger and that terrible fury that chokes up into tears that try to extinguish the fire you feel. But you do not want to be consoled. Like a woman’s desperate grasp on the threads of her ripped pantyhose, tubed lipstick now applied by finger, rouge smeared rushed. Today is all hers, but she patches it with clear nail polish and finding someone to kiss so that the lipstick, the threads unraveled, can all be blamed on whose love she exists to receive rather than a sign of her existence in time, of well-worn things, the breeze that once ran through her hair, and being caught on a second of a minute. For today is broken and she intends to mend it. For today is only one out of many before her rapidly approaching expiry date. For what is a woman if not defined by her relationship with a man? But she does not know that today never breaks, it only ever bends slightly at the pressure of her fingertips.

I guess it doesn’t really matter what connections I have missed or will miss. Ghosts serve no purpose but to haunt, unless kept alive in memory. I keep alive my today by missing it dearly, by shaping it with the press of these keys despite the fact they will not make it out of this draft. But I wonder

what meaning will you give today ?